Digital lighting technologies, i.e. illumination based on semiconductor light sources, such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs), offer a viable alternative to traditional fluorescent, HID, and incandescent lamps. LEDs offer many advantages, including controllability, high energy conversion and optical efficiency, durability, and lower operating costs. Recent advances in controllable LED technology have provided efficient and robust full-spectrum lighting sources that enable a variety of lighting effects in many applications.
Alongside the development of controllable LEDs, rapid developments have been made in the area of sensor technologies. Sensors today are not only able to effectively measure natural illumination and occupancy, but have also become significantly smaller, and therefore able to easily fit inside small devices, including devices housing controllable LEDs and cameras. For example, existing natural illumination based lighting control systems are able to employ individually controllable luminaires with dimming ballasts as well as one or more natural illumination photo sensors to measure the average workplane illumination within a naturally illuminated space. In such systems, one or more controllers, in order to respond to daylight egress and maintain a minimum workplane illumination, may monitor the output of one or more photosensors and control illumination provided by the luminaires.
More recently, innovations in the realms of wireless communication and smart mobile devices have launched a generation of smart phones and tablet computers with unparalleled mobility and computational power. For example, mobile smart phones with access to applications on cloud servers are able to gather, and process data from their immediate environments in real time. Additionally, location-based services allow for the customization of information delivered to mobile devices. Smart mobile devices, used in conjunction with controllable LEDs and appropriate sensors can therefore be used to customize illumination in physical spaces in real time.
Today, two other significant technological developments present even greater opportunities for innovations in the area of environmental management and control: Power over Ethernet (PoE) and Coded Light (CL). PoE allows for the delivery of electrical power along with data over a single cable to devices such as lighting devices, IP cameras or wireless access points. The advent of PoE technology makes it feasible to power devices in remote locations within building structures, by significantly reducing the need for electricians to install conduit, electrical wiring, and outlets. Unlike other devices, the potential location of a PoE device is not limited based on the placement of AC outlets within a structure. For example, PoE allows wireless LAN access points to be placed on ceilings for more optimal RF reception.
CL technology can be used to embed unique identifiers, or codes, into the light output from different light sources. Using these identifiers, the light emanating from a specific light source can be differentiated even in the presence of illumination contributions from multiple other light sources. CL can therefore be used to identify and locate individual light sources and devices relative to other such sources and devices. The use of light as a means for device identification, location and communication opens the door to innovative systems and methods for managing environmental conditions by allowing fine-grained interactions between devices such as individually controllable LEDs, sensors, and control devices such as smart phones that were not previously feasible.
Existing systems and methods for managing environmental conditions within physical structures do not simultaneously leverage the benefits of the aforementioned technologies. Some existing systems merely utilize controllable LEDs and sensors to automatically control lighting in areas such as offices and living rooms in response to changes in, for example, occupancy and natural illumination in the area. Other existing systems provide mobile applications that allow users to remotely control the behavior of lighting devices within such spaces. But no existing system provides the hardware and software infrastructure necessary to effectively manage the complex interaction of a multitude of PoE and CL enabled devices (e.g. lighting devices and HVAC appliances), smart mobile controllers, wall-mounted controllers, and sensors monitoring the activity and environmental conditions in large facilities such as office buildings. The effective management of environmental conditions within such spaces poses several unique technological challenges discussed below. The embodiments disclosed herein offer solutions to these and other challenges.
Large office buildings or other large commercial buildings usually have areas that are used for a variety of purposes. An office building may have conference or meeting rooms, large open-plan spaces with a multitude of cell offices, hallways, cafeterias, and auditoriums. Some of these areas may be generally used for group discussions or large presentations (e.g. conference rooms and auditoriums), while others may be used for individual work (e.g. cell offices). Given their different purposes, some modes of controlling environmental conditions (e.g. personalized control) may therefore be better suited to some areas (e.g. cell offices) rather than other areas (auditoriums and cafeterias). Unlike single family homes or apartments, large office buildings also accommodate sizable numbers of individuals, often in close quarters. These individuals may have differing and often conflicting interests regarding environmental conditions they wish to create in the spaces they occupy. When the same space is being used by different individuals, therefore, it is crucial to resolve conflicting requests to adjust environmental conditions in a meaningful rather than arbitrary way. Moreover, the amount of control a user may be allowed to exert in any space may depend on his or her role within an organization. It may be problematic, for example, if an employee attending a presentation in a large auditorium is able to use an application on his/her smart phone to change lighting conditions in the whole auditorium at any time.
Managing environmental conditions inside large structures therefore involves effectively prioritization and coordinating the potentially numerous concurrent control requests arising from a large number of stationary and mobile controllers representing a variety of users. These requests would need to be successfully routed to appropriate lighting devices and HVAC appliances in order to produce the requested changes within a time frame that also reasonably meets user expectations.
The variety of lighting and HVAC devices/appliances that typically operate in large buildings presents another fundamental challenge to any system for controlling environmental conditions. These devices do not all produce data in the same format, nor do they all support communications over the same protocols. Yet, under many circumstances, it may be necessary for these devices to communicate with each other, directly or through intermediate modules. To ensure that devices are able to communicate with each other, either direct or indirectly, when necessary, systems for managing environmental conditions will need to provide the means necessary for such communication to occur.
Yet another challenge facing systems for managing environmental conditions is that once the numerous sensor, control and other devices and system components are installed and operational within a large structure, new devices designed to produce or receive data in formats not supported by the system become available. For systems for managing environmental conditions in large structures, this problem is even more acute since these systems likely utilize many more types of devices as compared to simpler systems for managing environmental conditions in smaller spaces such as residential homes. Such larger-scale systems will need to be adaptable enough to accommodate the use of such new devices in order to be able to take advantage of improvements in technology. As a result, it is very important that these systems are designed to be easily extensible to accommodate new devices and technologies so that they may be integrated into the system with minimal effort and without undue disruption to the operation of the system.
Although existing systems for managing environmental conditions in relatively smaller spaces, such as in apartments or homes, may monitor device usage for a variety of reasons, the amount of such usage data generated by such systems is relatively small. By contrast, a large building or structure will likely generate large amounts of usage data due to the large numbers of devices (lighting and HVAC devices and sensors) in these structures. This data will need to be gathered, categorized and analyzed in order for the system to gain any useful insights for use in, for example, fine tuning existing energy conservation strategies. In order to make good use of the data, without overwhelming or degrading the performance of the system as a whole, a system for managing environmental conditions in a large structure needs to be designed to accommodate the potentially large influx of usage data. Some such systems may be designed such that the management of usage data is significantly decentralized. For example, device usage data gathered from different floors of a building may be managed by separate modules using separate data storage facilities.
Lastly, while there are privacy issues surrounding the management of usage data in smaller settings, the issues are not comparable in scale to the privacy issues that must be dealt with in much larger settings. For example, an environment management system designed for a residential setting such as an apartment may only have a few individual users whose personal information needs to be handled in a manner that does not create risk of disclosure to unintended parties. By contrast, a large entity occupying a large office space may have hundreds of users who frequent the space, accessing various system components via a multitude of user interfaces on a variety of devices, including their personal mobile devices. For example, the use of personal mobile computing devices as controllers for CL enabled lighting and other devices can result in, for example, useful but sensitive associations between a user's identity and particular frequented spaces. Accordingly, the design of environment management systems for deployment in large structures needs to provide for the implementation of strategies to prevent both unauthorized access to such sensitive information from within the system itself (e.g. one system user accessing information on the whereabouts of another), and from outside the system (e.g. cyber security breaches exposing such sensitive information to the outside world).
Furthermore, in large and complex illumination and environmental management systems, a large number of luminaries and other devices may be deployed. Over time, new luminaries and other devices may be added to the system, and existing luminaires or other devices may be replaced or upgraded with new capabilities, functions, or configurations. In that case, it is possible that some “legacy” devices may exist in a system which may not operate properly, or may cease to operate altogether, when it is attempted to upgrade them to support new capabilities, functions, or configurations. Particularly when a system is large or complex, it may not be immediately apparent to the owner or operator of the system that this has occurred so that corrective actions may be taken with respect to the malfunctioning or non-operating luminaries and other devices. Furthermore, human intervention in such cases may incur significant costs and/or inconvenience, and so this is not always an optimal solution.
No existing system for managing environmental conditions provides solutions to at least the aforementioned challenges. The systems and methods presented below provide solutions designed to address these and other challenges.